Child of Argentina's 'disappeared' fights for right to keep adoptive name

Hilario Bacca was one of hundreds abducted as a baby after his parents were killed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship

Photographs of people who disappeared during the military dictatorship; at least 5,000 were murdered at the ESMA base in Buenos Aires, where Hilario Bacca was born. Photograph: Daniel Garcia/AFP/Getty Images

For Hilario Bacca, it was a knock on the door that threatened not only to change his life, but his name as well.

Armed police entered, searching for DNA. They took a toothbrush and socks, but it was a razor blade that gave them what they wanted. The sample confronted Bacca with a truth he had been avoiding since the age of four, when the couple he believed were his real parents told him he was adopted. His name was not his real name. Bacca was one of hundreds of children born to people who were "disappeared" during the 1976-1983 dictatorship. The search for truth has taken a generation.

"I was born in a death camp, then the dictators killed my parents, then during a democracy they entered my home at gunpoint and took a DNA sample without my consent and opened a court against my adoptive parents," Bacca said. "And now they want to change my name."

Some 500 children are believed to have been born under such circumstances and then handed over to military-approved families to be raised with the "western and Christian values" the military claimed to defend. More than 100 have been "recovered" so far by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group set up in 1977 to locate such children.

The Grandmothers are justifiably proud of their tireless campaign to find their missing grandchildren. "These kind of abductions will never happen again anywhere in the world because women like us will rise against it, like a lioness to defend her cubs," said Estela Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers, last week on receiving a $150,000 (£97,000) prize from Unesco at its headquarters in Paris.

But in recent years, as the missing grandchildren became grown men and women who frequently refused to deal with their past, a special law allowing compulsory DNA testing has become an essential tool in the task.

For Bacca, the knock on the door at his Buenos Aires apartment three years ago was a traumatising experience. "I didn't want to deal with the story of torture and murder I suspected lay in my past," he said. The sample showed conclusively what the Grandmothers had long suspected, that Hilario Bacca, as he was named on his falsified birth certificate, was actually Federico Cagnola Pereyra.

The court in charge of the case quickly began the prosecution of Jorge and Cristina Bacca, the couple who raised him, and ordered his birth certificate changed to his real birth name.

But then Hilario Bacca, who is convinced the Baccas adopted him in good faith, surprised everyone by becoming the first person to appeal against such a name change in court.

"I am an adult and I am uncomfortable with this schizophrenic idea that I have to kill Hilario Bacca to give birth to somebody I am not," said Bacca.

"This had never happened to us before in the about dozen cases of compulsory DNA testing we've pursued," said Alan Iud, a lead lawyer for the Grandmothers. "But there is no way we can allow the courts to validate a false surname that is the result of an aberrant crime against human rights."

Despite the legal battle, Bacca has joined the Grandmothers organisation, moving to work at its office in the resort of Mar del Plata south of Buenos Aires and establishing a solid bond with his birth grandmothers.

Although the court of appeals has allowed Bacca to continue using his current name until congress legislates on the matter, Iud believes the court prosecuting his adoptive parents will have the last say. "The name change will be settled by a judge, not legislators," he said.

Bacca takes comfort in the thought that his birth parents might have supported what may prove a quixotic quest. "If my parents were willing to die for an ideal they believed in, the best way for me to imitate them is to fight for my own ideals, only this time under a democracy."